http://www.fromallangles.com/newspapers/country/india/tehelka.com.htm
A decade since our economy was officially creaked open to the influences of the market in the name of globalisation. Required medicine, the nation was told, swallow or perish. What's that done for those at the lower end of the spiral? We begin a fortnightly exploration. First stop: Vidarbha's famished fields By Dilip D' Souza My first visit to Vidarbha was in late February. My second was in late April. In the two months in between, the count rose by 130-plus; over two a day. Something is happening in those sun-drenched cotton fields that the rest of us have not comprehended yet, and it is happening at an alarming rate. Every journalist interested in this issue gets and quotes figures from the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (vjas) - who have been tracking farmer suicides for a long time - and here's what those figures look like, two months apart. February 24, 328 dead. April 22, 462 dead. These are running counts: those many farmers dead, at their own hands, since June last year. When you talk to people in Vidarbha about this phenomenon, you get a range of reactions. A rough traverse of the spectrum: three wealthy farmers in Amaravati said it was, essentially, a hoax. A journalist in Akola said there were certainly suicides happening, but the whole thing was exaggerated by a media focus which reads "rural crisis" into every suicide of a farmer, for whatever reason. A cotton buyer in Amaravati said it was real, but it had to do with the laziness of Vidarbha's farmers. A small businessman in Barshi-Takli was very concerned, even taking us to homes where deaths had happened that were not on the vjas list. A journalist in Nagpur told us the rural crisis in Vidarbha is deep and unprecedented, and with current policies as they are, he is profoundly pessimistic about any turnaround. On one thing, everyone agrees: farmers are in debt, and debt is a factor in how they go about their lives. Or deaths. And then there's the reaction we got in Dadham, not far from Akola. There, a gathering of village men sit us down in the village panchayat building and tell us a story. A true story. A story of blood and terror that, nevertheless, they are visibly proud of. A story of a lynching. A gathering ... In his stirring novel A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines writes of a small Louisiana town in the 1970s, where a hated white man is murdered. When the Sheriff turns up to investigate, he finds 18 old black gents at the murder spot, each holding a gun and an empty shell similar to the one used to kill. The Sheriff is bewildered: every one of the 18 claims to have killed the man. (In fact, each chapter in the book is a first person account by one of the old men, amounting to a series of confessions). Faced with this, how do you build a case? Something similar in Dadham, not far from Akola. Bandu Wakhare was a moneylender in Akola. He was a familiar figure in Dadham, because he was always willing to lend money at extortionate rates (10 percent a week, said the men in the panchayat office), and because he regularly showed up in the village with a thug accomplice to demand payments from his debtors. They would try to pay him "batch mein" - "in batch", meaning in installments - but it was never good enough for Wakhare. Why did Dadham's small farmers borrow from this creep? In general, debt is a normal thing in these parts - you borrow, you pay back when your crop goes to market. But with poor harvests and an end to the government's fixed purchase price regime over the last couple of years, paying back loans is hard. Many of these men were already defaulters on loans from banks, which meant they could get no more money that way. With no other way to borrow, they had to turn to a man like Wakhare, and put up with his tyranny. Premchand Pandurang Kule, 22-year-old and married with a one-year-old son, was one such client. He took over two acres of farmland just outside Dadham from his father, a leprosy patient who could no longer work in the fields. Last year, he borrowed Rs 2, 000 - yes, two thousand rupees - from Wakhare to buy farming supplies. Unable to repay quickly, he became a target of Wakhare's demands, and lived in constant fear of being beaten up. One day in April 2005, he watched Wakhare and goon thrash a young man he knew. Frightened out of his wits, he ran off to a nearby patch of jungle and swallowed rat poison. He was found dead on the road. Aware of the spectre that had haunted Kule and driven him to this, the villagers complained to the police about Wakhare, and even filed a case. The enraged moneylender turned up in Dadham, threatening to "finish" the people who had filed the case. He went to a field belonging to a cousin of Kule's, demanding his money. Three people were working in the field, two of whom were women. Wakhare told the man and the older woman to run away, because he planned to rape the younger woman. He didn't manage that, because she ran too. But he returned to the village and wandered about breaking doors and cycles and a motorcycle and laying waste an entire chicken shop. At one debtor's home, he told the man to sell his daughter so he could repay Wakhare. He made "sexy talk" with the women there: talk, one of the men says to us, "that we cannot repeat here." Abuse, vandalism and beatings were the norm for Wakhare. But these threats against the womenfolk crossed an invisible line. Word quickly spread in the village, everybody grew irate. The young men gathered and ... "we finished him", they say to us. "Who did?" I ask. "All of us." "All of us" began hitting Wakhare with lathis, chasing him from lane to lane in the village until he had nowhere to run. Very simply, they beat him to death. When the police turned up, nobody in Dadham was willing to be a "panch" (witness) about what had happened. But like in Gaines's story, every single young man in the village claimed he had killed Wakhare. (Smiles on the faces telling us this). So the police found witnesses from the next village, Ridhora, men who weren't even present when the lynching happened. They named five Dadham men whom Wakhare had tormented in the past; on that circumstantial evidence, the police arrested those five and charged them with his murder. The local mla, Gulabrao Gavande, took an interest in the case, helped with legal expenses and raised a question in the Assembly. "Only I have the strength to fight these thugs because I am a wrestler and have an akhada with me," Gavande told the Frontline magazine last December. "I told the villagers not to spare anyone who harasses them." With all this, the case inevitably collapsed. The five were acquitted after four or five months. More smiles on those faces. My breath temporarily knocks out of me; I look around myself in this panchayat office. On the walls are ruddy-cheeked portraits of Rajiv Gandhi and his mother, of Shivaji, Netaji Bose, Gadge Baba, Tukdoji Maharaj, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Savitribai Phule, BR Ambedkar and MK Gandhi. What would they have thought of this tale? Of the smiles? What should I think about feeling, on hearing of a lynching after days of hearing about suicides, a lifting of my own heart and spirits? Who would have thought this is the story lurking behind one of Vidarbha's suicides? Also on the panchayat wall, and on a welcome arch at the entrance to the village, are certificates awarded to Dadham in the annual "Gram Swacchatha Abhiyan" (Village Cleanliness Drive). The most recent is of 2002-03. People here are proud of this recognition, and Dadham is noticeably cleaner than other villages we've been in. And I can't help thinking, if Dadham wins recognition for cleanliness again this year, surely at least some of its residents will recall the day they did some serious cleaning up. Not with brooms, but with sticks and a fierce anger. May 27 , 2006 _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
